I'm the founder of Millennial Branding, a Gen-Y research and management consulting firm. I also wrote the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, now in 13 languages. My second book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success, will be released in 2013 by St. Martins Press. I've been featured in over 500 media outlets, including Wired and ELLE magazines. I've also written for BusinessWeek, CNN International, TIME, The Wall Street Journal and several other national outlets. I speak on topics such as Gen-Y workforce management, personal branding, social media, and career development for companies such as Google, Time Warner, IBM, and CitiGroup. In 2010, I was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 List, and BusinessWeek cited me as someone entrepreneurs should follow on Twitter.

David Karp on Tumblr's Growth, Monetization and Future Plans

I interviewed David Karp as part of his profile in this months issue of Forbes Magazine. David is the founder and CEO of Tumblr, a popular short-form blogging platform. At age 26, he made this years Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the media category. In 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

David attended The Calhoun School from age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science, until high school when he attended Bronx Science for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling. Karp began interning for animation producer Fred Seibert at 14, and from there went on to work as a software consultant for UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum. Karp left UrbanBaby in 2006 and began working on Tumblr later that year. The site launched in November 2007.

In this interview, David tells his story on how he started Tumblr, how he’s grown it to what it is today, how he’s found advisors and partners and why he’s staying in New York City instead of moving to Silicon Valley. He also explains how the company plans to make money and his future plans for the platform.

David, tell me about how Tumblr has grown into what it is today and the features that have spurred its growth.

On the features that spurred growth—this is something we actually talk about fairly often, how the shape of the network and the success of the network was very accidental and very much spurred by evolutions in the product. Just to run you through them real quick, the big milestones for us—the beginning of 2007, Tumblr launched as a sort of novel publishing platform that was an alternative to the traditional blogging platforms that were very much about editorial publishing and we took this approach that was much more about raw, real time feed. At the time, our slogan was ‘everything you find, love, hate or create’. Anything at all as it happens, as you find it, as you make it you put it right out there, there’s no editorial, there’s no publishing.

It’s much more about sharing those things that you’re finding or creating. Out of that, we quickly figured out that these things are not only sort of different from other things people were creating out there on the Web at the time, traditional blogging, which was blowing up in 2006 and 2007, wasn’t just different, it was actually really kind of neat. We very quickly started to find a lot of very cool people doing some very cool stuff with Tumblr and we very quickly realized that we have no good way to find all of it. We were discovering links to blogs on our own network through Twitter, through posts on Tumblr where people were just linking to other blogs that they had found, we were scouring Google, we were literally getting email links from our buddies who were like ‘oh, did you see this cool Tumblr blog yet? We were like ‘no we didn’t, no we didn’t see this blog yet’ and we figured out pretty quickly that having some sort of a directory, some sort of way to find all of this stuff could actually be kind of cool because these blogs were not only different than what other people were creating at the time, they were attracting some very creative people that were doing some cool stuff with it.

The first big evolution was when we created a directory. It’s basically a self-serve directory where everybody can go and tag their blog, upload a graphic and digitally list themselves; create a listing for themselves in these directories. We very quickly discovered thousands upon thousands of these blogs on Tumblr that we had no idea were there and were really creating some very cool stuff. So all of a sudden this idea that we were, I don’t know, not just a tool, not just a platform but like a place with people doing cool stuff, started to emerge and the next big realization that happened almost as soon as we had those directories starting to get filled up, the next huge realization for us was that Tumblr really sucked with RSS. So RSS, which was the predominant platform at the time for following blogs on the Internet but was really designed for that traditional editorial publishing that blogs had become, really didn’t support and wasn’t compatible with Tumblr content which was much more designed, much more about small containers of media. It just looked bad. It was just very awkward to browse and follow Tumblr content through Google Reader or through NetNewsWire, through those RSS readers.

First the evolution is find the stuff, next realization is that it’s actually sucky to keep up with all of this cool stuff. So we had already built this in Dashboard, which is like a content management system, it was a tool you use to manage your blog, and we said that it wouldn’t be much harder to take this interface that displays your own Tumblr content and suck in other people’s Tumblr content. So as an alternative to the RSS readers out there we can create our own little tool to not just create but to be able to subscribe to this content, the stuff that people are making on Tumblr. This was right around the time that Twitter was maybe a year and a half old, maybe two years old. They had just popularized this notion of the following model where you don’t have to have a two-way friend relationship, you can just hit a follow button and all of a sudden suck content from someone else’s account. We said ‘that’s perfect, we’ll put a follow button on all our blogs and sub-Tumblr content into the dashboard.’ This changed nearly overnight and certainly within two months, this totally turned the shape of our network on its head.

We went from being the normal distribution of audience that you see on any publishing platform right, so Reddit, YouTube, WordPress, any of these platforms, 1 percent of the traffic, 1 percent of the activity is logged in users that are making the stuff, the creators, and 99 percent of the traffic comes from the audience, people that show up on YouTube and watch the videos, right? That’s the 99 percent rule. By adding this new following behavior to Tumblr, in two months suddenly 75 percent of our traffic was being generated by logged in users who are following blogs on Tumblr and hitting refresh all day; just sitting there watching all these new posts come up on their dashboard. So that really changed things pretty profoundly and lead us to the next epiphany, the next realization which this one was harder to wrap our heads around, but was really an interesting one which is all of these tools that we had built to make content on Tumblr, to bring content into the networks, we had our bookmarklet, we had the ability to call your blog and leave a message that appears as an audio post.

Most of the cool stuff that we wanted to share wasn’t coming in from outside of the network, it wasn’t coming in from browsing YouTube or through our RSS reader, it was coming from the dashboard or from our friends emailing to us. It was like all of a sudden all this stuff we were finding in the dashboard using Tumblr all day or we would go ‘woah, that’s awesome, I want to post that; I want to share that.’ It was something we were seeing in our own use of Tumblr, we were seeing all across our network more and more people were finding all of this cool stuff on their Tumblr dashboards. This is one that we noodled on for a while before eventually arriving at this idea of re-blogging. If you’ve used re-blogging on Tumblr before, this is where re-tweeting and re-pinning, that whole paradox came from, it came from this wacky idea that the coolest stuff that we wanted to share we were actually not finding in Tumblr and rather than making you rip all that out, rip the image out, the text out and copy and paste it into a whole new post, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just hit a button and quickly share it with your readers, with more people and even keep it for yourself on your own blog.

That was largely inspired too by YouTube which at this point had really proven this YouTube viral star idea; this notion that one person could post a video and without even expecting anything necessarily, that video could be passed around the Internet, get hugely, hugely popular and get all of this attention all across the web where all of those plays point back to YouTube and ultimately will elevate that video. For example, it would elevate Evolution of Dance inside YouTube so that this video was just being seen by all these people all over the web all over the world ultimately gets reflected inside YouTube’s ecosystem where those rankings push that video up to the top.

When you go to YouTube you know that Evolution of Dance is blowing up even though it didn’t blow up on YouTube.com, it might have blown up everywhere else. I was really enamored with this idea and we were dealing with the fact that we were seeing all this stuff on Tumblr that we wanted to re-share so we said ‘wouldn’t it be cool that instead of messing around with embed codes and instead of having to copy and paste stuff, we could with one button do with what you have to do with the embed code on YouTube today? And wouldn’t it be cool since Tumblr supports all of this media not just video, wouldn’t it be cool if this worked for anything; it worked for links, quotes, text, images, photosets, everything; video, songs, audio—what if it worked for everything, not just video? ’

That was where an idea that we didn’t know was going to work but we were very intrigued by, that’s where this idea of re-blogging came from and again, kind of profoundly changed the shape and the growth of our network overnight. What re-blogging did, didn’t just let the creators, the people that were using Tumblr, make it a little bit easier to post this stuff what it did was it added this whole new—it did do that but the side effect that had a profound effect on the shape of our network was it added this whole new class of user on Tumblr that we always called curators, these users who take the original creative works that the core community of creators was making on Tumblr and it slices it up, curates it and sort of serves it up in tens of millions of permutations. Let me explain what that means. I might blog on Tumblr where I might take my photos and occasionally write an essay or some poetry every now and then.

Hypothetically let’s say I’m posting my photos and poetry and a young kid comes along and they’re taking their own photos but mostly they’re just looking for their inspiration and they find my blog and they love my photography and they follow me and they re-blog all of the photos that move them most. They’re also following dozens or hundreds of other blogs and they’re re-blogging all of the photos that move them most, capture them most and curate their collection of their beautiful photos. To them, where for me the tool might be the camera it might be the words that I write with; for this young, aspiring kid or for this an aspiring adult that’s exploring a new interest, for that aspirational person, that ability to curate those images that they’re curating, the poetry that they’re curating, the writing, the whatever, the videos they’re curating those are the colors that they’re painting with; those are the words that they’re writing with.

They’re maybe not getting in front of the camera to play the song but they are expressing themselves through the stuff that they curate much in the same way that you express yourself in the clothes that you wear, the way you decorate your apartment, that sort of stuff. So out of this whole new opportunity for people who weren’t necessarily able to get in front of the camera and play guitar, weren’t necessarily sitting down to write, spend two hours writing an essay every night; it opened Tumblr up to a creative class that is incredibly creative but is not necessarily the ones making the original works, instead are pacemakers in the way that they have approached creativity. So it opened Tumblr up to this new category of users. It also kind of changed the shape of our network in this way that was really beneficial to all of the groups. So in traditional we had users and the audience that came to see what they were doing. Now we have creators who are doing their best work, who are getting picked up by this big web of curators. Imagine this community of creators and usually we count them in the millions so those are the people they are getting in front of the camera and playing guitar, they are writing the songs, they are writing the essays, the haiku, the jokes, you know whatever it is, taking the photos. Then we have tens of millions of these curators that basically slice that creative content up in all those permutations partly in an effort to be pacemakers and partly in an effort to express themselves with the tool that they have.

The creators love the curators because the curators spread their stuff out far and wide, so this is one of the coolest stats we have on Tumblr today; the average post is re-blogged nine times. So you think the average post you make on Tumblr is going to be on 10 blogs, 10 RSS feeds, it’s going to go out on four Facebook feeds and three Twitter feeds—it gets your stuff spread out far and wide. The opportunity for a creator is huge. If you want people to see your photos and hear your songs, the opportunity in that web of creators is enormous; it’s very meritocratic—the curators, there’s no payola, there’s nothing jaded about it at all. The curators are there expressing themselves and sharing stuff that moves them. If you can create something that moves them, then it’s an incredibly supporting relationship; it’s a great ecosystem. The creators love the curators because they spread their stuff far and wide. The curators love the creators because they’re building the stuff, making the stuff that they use to express themselves and the curators are hungry for that stuff because that’s what defines them as curators—their ability to get the best stuff, the fastest basically.

The curators are hungry for all those creative works; the creators are thrilled the curators are spreading their stuff out far and wide. The curators love the audience because the audience, again the curators aren’t making the things themselves so a lot of their self-worth and validation is tied up in whether or not they see themselves as successful pacemakers. A lot of the way they see the world is “Am I reaching more people?” “Is my stuff resonating with as many people as the people next to me in the fashion community or the music community? The curators, not all of them but many of them, derive a lot of validation from the reaction that they get from that audience. The audience obviously loves everybody, the love the creative company, they love the curators because they make Tumblr a place where you can find anything; anything that you’re obsessed with is being obsessively curated and organized across 75 million blogs on Tumblr with this big network of curators.

Imagine this core community of creators at the center, this web of curators wrapped around that community and they draw a big surface area with all of the blogs, all these permutations of content they’re curating; they draw this big surface area around our network that’s able to reach this big, big audience—and that’s really one of the ways Tumblr is able to reach this big, big audience. That’s how re-blogging profoundly changed the shape of our network. There’s been some evolution since then, out of re-blogging networks started to take shape and those networks started turn into communities, so we see some very strong, tight-knit little communities now on Tumblr. If you go to Tumblr.com/meetups you’ll see that there are. Did you actually know that there are in the order of 800 meet-ups a month now? I mean there is this insane number of these creators on Tumblr now meeting up to talk about their blogs, talk about their art, perform for each other—all of these things. They really are on order of hundreds of these a week. And these aren’t organized by Tumblr by the way, these are just totally community-run.

These communities started to take shape. A few years ago, we had our first international traction, we started blogs— Japan was early, Southeast Asia was early, then later came Brazil and Europe. A couple years ago we started to see some mainstream traction in the U.S. that really started to overshadow our international traffic but regardless it really overshadowed all of our growth that came before it. Two years ago, if you look at our growth curve that’s when Tumblr took off. If we’re on the map today that’s when we made it on the map and it like so quickly just hit us that it shadowed all the three years we had before that, which were great but that’s when the impact of the network really changed and when we noticed it.

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